Identity politics overtake feminist movement

Ideology is more important to many feminists today than helping women.

(This column originally appeared in the Toronto Sun)

By: Candice Malcolm

When it comes to violence against women, not all victims are treated equally by our society.

The most blatant example of this double standard comes via the bombshell of yet another child sex grooming scandal in the United Kingdom.

Last time, it was Rotherham, and we learned that for four decades police and politicians had quietly looked the other way while more than 1,500 girls were abused by so-called grooming gangs in the northern English town.

This time around, we’re learning of a potentially even bigger scandal in the town of Telford.

In both cases, members of South Asian and Pakistani gangs began grooming girls as young as 11 into prostitution. These gangsters deliberately targeted girls from poor and broken families with a pattern that repeated itself: vulnerable girls are lured in, given drugs, raped, beaten and abused before being pushed into prostitution rings.

We’ve learned girls were ignored by police despite repeated appeals and that many in positions of power knew about the grooming gangs and chose to do nothing.

Political correctness and cultural relativism — not wanting to hold immigrants to the same standards as citizens — have brought us to a point where police would rather allow wretched crimes to take place than be accused of racism or Islamophobia.

The story of white girls being abused by Muslim immigrants is not exactly the story liberal journalists and feminist activists want to tell.

And that’s why, despite some of the most horrific details of abuse towards women in recent memory, the story of the Telford girls has barely made it into the mainstream media.

For all the outrage and activism stirred up during the #MeToo movement — rich and powerful Hollywood celebrities standing up to rich and powerful Hollywood producers — today’s feminists are disturbingly quiet over a sex grooming scandal involving lower class British girls.

Modern feminism has taken a radical turn away from supporting equality of opportunity for women, and towards a hierarchy of victimhood based on group identity and Leftist ideology.

The new feminism is based on the Marxist concept of exploitation, except it’s applied across cultural rather than class lines.

Cultural Marxists have divided our society into groups based on race, gender and sexual orientation; rather than being united as Canadians, we’re split up into identity groups and pitted against each other.

This is identity politics and it has taken over the feminist movement.

If there was any doubt over the direction the feminist movement is heading, look no further than our feminist federal government.

Maryam Monsef, minister for the status of women, recently described how cultural Marxism is inserted into every aspect of government policy.

“My job is to monitor the quality and consistency of the intersectional gendered lens, GBA +, that we apply to every government decision that comes before cabinet.”

Intersectionality is the academic concept that promotes group identity over our traditional values of individual rights and legal equality.

Liberals in Canada used to stand for the individual rights and freedoms of all Canadians. As Trudeau often points out, they were the party that introduced the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

But today’s liberal, in Canada and throughout the West, has shifted focus away from protecting individuals and towards the Marxist doctrine that promotes group identity.

In pursuit of ‘social justice,’ today’s liberals seem willing to sacrifice those who fall into the wrong group identity — like the girls of Telford and Rotherham.